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Dylan Matthews

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Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola 's attempts to break the Anglican Communion apart continue : Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared Sunday that they would defy historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the communion led by a council predominantly of African archbishops. [...] They insisted that they were not breaking away from the Anglican Communion or creating a schism. But their plans, if carried out, could create severe upheaval in the communion, the world’s third largest grouping of churches, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. This upheaval has been going on for a while; conservatives within the communion have been breaking from the American church for years now, ever since openly gay New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson was consecrated in 2003. Akinola has been essential to the break. He defied the requests of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and...

The Obama campaign is adding more former Clinton people to its staff, and the latest hire is Neera Tanden , the Clinton campaign's former policy director, who'll be running domestic policy for Obama. One of Tanden's more notable roles in the Clinton campaign was helping to develop her health care proposal. Between this and Obama health advisor Kavita Patel 's hints today, noted by Ezra, that Obama may reconsider his opposition to an individual mandate, it seems that the Obama camp may be reformulating its health care plan to move it closer to Clinton's. This is pretty savvy; it became clear over the course of the primary that opponents of individual mandates are generally less invested in the issue than proponents, many of whom backed Clinton or Edwards primarily because of this issue. The hire may also indicate, ironically, a repudiation of Bill Clinton 's approach to health care reform in 1994. His cardinal sin, in the eyes of Obama and many other Democrats, was a lack of openness...

Nancy Pelosi proposed an unlikely candidate as Barack Obama 's running-mate yesterday -- Texas Rep. Chet Edwards . Edwards represents the 17th district, a heavily Republican area with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+18 . He's also notable as the only Democratic congressman targeted by Tom DeLay 's 2003 redistricting plan to survive. While the appeal of picking a Texas Democrat, especially one who has beaten back adversaries like DeLay in past elections, is understandable, Edwards would be a poor choice. Not only did he vote for the Iraq war authorization in 2002, a vote which could undermine the Obama campaign's emphasis on foreign policy judgment, he has an, at best, mixed record when it comes to votes on withdrawal. While he voted for the House leadership's Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act in 2007, he also voted for a Republican resolution in 2006 rejecting an "arbitrary date for withdrawal or redeployment" , and for a 2007 emergency appropriations bill for the war without a...

New York State Senate majority leader Joseph L. Bruno , the highest-ranking Republican in the state, announced last night that he won't seek reelection to the Senate this year. Bruno has been majority leader for fourteen years now, twelve years of which he served alongside George Pataki and Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver . This era was the single longest period the same three politicians composed the "three men in a room" who control the New York State political process. That said, the last couple years haven't been kind to Bruno. Since 2006, he has faced a federal investigation into his business dealings, police surveillance against him ordered by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer , and a whittling of his Senate majority to a single vote. Bruno's period as majority leader doesn't have much to recommend it. He maintained a consistently conservative record, attempting to reinstitute the death penalty , working with Pataki to slash Medicaid spending , and thwarting Spitzer's attempt to...

Editors' Note: Dylan Matthews is a summer 2008 Prospect editorial intern. The annual Foreign Policy / Prospect list of the "World's Top Public Intellectuals" is out , and the top ten, for the first time, is composed entirely of Muslims. Topping the list is Philadelphia-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen , followed by Nobel laureate and microcredit pioneer Muhammed Yunus , Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi , and Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk . In a development sure to frustrate Paul Berman , Swiss theologian Tariq Ramadan (#8) bests Dutch-Somali anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (#15), and a third Nobelist, Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi , rounds out the top ten. Perhaps even more surprising are the countries of origin of the Muslim intellectuals in the top ten. Only two, al-Qaradawi and televangelist Amr Khaled , come from an Arab country (Egypt). Two (Gülen and Pamuk) are Turkish. Two -- Yunus and Pakistani bar association...